Spatio-Temporal Estimation of Surface Water Area in Dohuk Governorate Using Remote Sensing & GIS

Surface Water area (SWA) extraction is an important part of water resource management and has been the hottest topic in the remote sensing of water resource sector for over two decades. An approach is presented to estimate the change of area of surface water over 15 year period (2003 - 2018) using a time series of Landsat images. Twelve Landsat scenes were used to spatially and temporally cover Duhok Governorate, Kurdistan region-Iraq. A modified normalized different water index (MNDWI) were employed to quantitatively estimate the SWA and coincidently analyzed with the temporal change of precipitation and temperature data. Results show that the considerable decrement of SWA is observed from 2003 to 2008 with reduction of 51%. This is also was confirmed by metrological used data. Moreover, an increment of SWA is noticed from 2008 to 2013. However, a slight increment was realized between 2013 and 2018. In addition, during the studied period a climate conditions (temperature and precipitation) in Duhok Governorate have been changed significantly. These changes could have affected the SWA, but so also could external human interference.